Despite being two of the best-selling videogames ever, Skyrim and Fallout 4 don’t get much in the way of support from Bethesda anymore. This is something game director Todd Howard is acutely aware of, as in a new podcast interview he explains that he regrets not giving players even more to experience over the years. Howard then promises that games like Starfield, Fallout 5, and Elder Scrolls 6 are all looking to have decades-long plans, with even more DLC to enjoy over the years.
With Howard confirming that we’ll be getting a second DLC after the Starfield Shattered Space release date, alongside free updates for Bethesda’s newest RPG through 2025, the game director has also looked back at how the team supported older titles. In an interview with ‘MrMattyPlays,’ Howard clearly regrets dropping large-scale support on Skyrim and Fallout 4, saying Bethesda now has a “ten-year horizon” plan for the likes of Elder Scrolls 6, Starfield, and more.
“That expectation that we’ll update [Skyrim, ES6] for years is true,” Howard says when asked about Bethesda’s future plans to support its upcoming RPGs.
“We would look back at Skyrim, which we’re still updating, to a small extent, and there’s all of the creations and mods, [it’s] still a hugely played game.” Howard adds, while noting that he realizes Bethesda should have done more to its older games over time. “[We did the] same with Fallout 4, [but] we wish we had supported them longer.
“We went into [Fallout] 76, knowing ‘Hey, this is a game we’re going to support for as long as we can.’ Starfield, we go into that knowing the same thing. And as we go into Elder Scrolls 6, we’ve got to start now by thinking about a ten-year horizon.”
“How do we support a game for that long? That’s the trick, like as we sit here, right now, our games have never been more popular,” Howard continues. “We had last month 25 million players, and so far, it’s a staggering amount of people and players that we hear from where our number one job always is, ‘How are we serving that audience on a month-to-month basis?’ So we’re taking care of them while also developing.”
Howard’s regrets around Bethesda’s older games make complete sense when you look at the numbers. Last we heard Skyrim sold 60 million copies, and while we don’t have concrete numbers for Fallout 4 since 2015, it shipped 12 million copies to retailers for launch and became one of the best-selling games earlier this year, almost a decade after release, thanks to Amazon’s Fallout TV show.
Bethesda is as mainstream as Call of Duty or Fortnite, so it’s no surprise that looking back at mammoth successes like Fallout 4 and Skyrim has Howard and the team wishing they kept up official support with even more content. That said, maybe Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6, and Fallout 5 would take even longer to come out if we got even more DLC for the older RPGs.
You can still keep Tamriel and the Wasteland alive in 2024 though, as we’ve put together all the best Fallout 4 mods and Skyrim mods to download today that can completely overhaul, or bring quality-of-life fixes, to the RPGs.
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